Rochester Parkour Girl's Jams

One full year after the launch of www.RochesterParkour.com we now offer girl jams! The female only jams are designed to introduce new or interested traceuses to parkour in a more welcoming environment. Jams are lead by RocPK's own Jessie K who has been in the discipline for almost a year now.

Currently, Rochester Parkour's normal Saturday jams pull out ~30 people fairly consistently. While this is exciting for me, it can be rather intimidating to beginners, especially the females. The Girl Jams were set up and scheduled to provide a more beginner friendly environment to foster learning, play, and fun!

Yesterday, even through the cold and the rain, three new traceuses came out to explore and learn! Here are some pictures of the fun had last weekend:

Doing a great job girls! Keep up the good work! For more pictures, please visit my Flickr.

Good job RocPK girls!

All I want to do is have some fun.

And I've got a feeling that I'm not the only one...

The driving factor behind pretty much anything and everything kids do is the desire to "have fun." They haven't developed mentally enough to separate things they "have to do" from things they "want to do." There are lots of ways kids can have fun, but over the past 20 years what kids end up "wanting to do" has experienced a significant paradigm shift.

They used to want to play - they wanted to go outside, make believe, be cowboys and princesses, space captains or jump rope queens. Now when parents let kids "have fun" it's generally "Go watch four hours of cartoons" or "Go play XBox for the night." Instead of getting dirty, meeting the neighborhood kids, or expanding the imagination, it's all about the latest and greatest graphics and special effects.



Before the argument comes up that (some) games and (some) television shows can expand the imagination, there is such a huge difference between SHOWING and TELLING.

One of my favorite authors of all time is HP Lovecraft, a horror writer from the 20s and 30s. He wrote differently from almost everyone else though, and helped define the "strange fiction" genre. Instead of his stories describing ghosts and goblins and monsters and aliens terrorizing the world, his stories took a different route. While there certainly were ghosts and monsters, his stories were not about the creature - they were about the person. Mostly told in first person, his stories often followed a character's descent into insanity and madness. He rarely described the creature, and instead described the character's reaction to seeing it. He let you use your imagination to create the details, and in doing so the creature was different for every single person - and each person's image of the creature was terrifying to them personally. What freaks my friend out might not even phase me, but because my image of the creature is different from my friend's, we were both terrified.

Extrapolate this imagination-exercise into a child's situation: They're being shown what the aliens in Halo look like, versus going out into their back yard and imagining they're fighting off aliens that they've created. In order to stimulate imagination, kids need to go outside and play. Give a kid with a good imagination a stick and they should be able to entertain themselves for a whole day.

To help combat society's diminishing emphasis on play, an organization called KaBOOM! has sponsored a "National Play Day" week. September 19th-27th, over 300 organizations will be sponsoring events designed to encourage children to turn off the electronics, get outside, and just play!



Rochester Parkour will be doing their part. We will be sponsoring a free event at Manhattan Square Park, our usual training grounds, for ages 7-13. We will be focusing on the "play" side of Parkour - games, follow the leader, and exploring your environment - and we will be teaching kids about the importance of picking up after themselves, cleaning up trash, and leaving their playgrounds cleaner than they found them. You can find out more information about our event on our Playday Organization Page.

I know another one of these is happening in Madison, and Parkour Visions is considering hosting on in Seattle. Will these three communities be the only ones to help save play, or will you join the cause and host your own?

The Rochester Community

Upstate New York has, in the span of a year, become a bustling and lively community. Since the launch of Rochester Parkour, exposure has sky-rocketed and more and more people are coming out to see what parkour truly is.

Rochester is a great example of what can happen to an area with just a website and a couple of motivated practitioners. It is a new community, barely a year old, and already boasts over a hundred followers. Within this year, we have also been given wonderful opportunities to get media coverage ranging from TV interviews to newspaper articles.

As the school year came to an end, I wondered what, if anything, would happen to the community. The community here is mostly college students, who leave during the Summer, either back home or abroad. I was more than prepared to keep advertising, but settle for smaller group sessions of 1-5 traceurs.

This is where the power that just one strong media piece can bring shines. Our first Summer session jam had 15 new arrivals, 8 more on the second. Most of this group of 23 found us through our local newspaper, The Democrat and Chronicle or the Rochester Insider. The rest had done a simple google search.

Rochester really shines in the Summer, and the extra free time has allowed the group to travel more and experience other spots in the city, rather than our home location of Manhattan Square Park.

I am proud to say that the Rochester community is alive and kicking and is no longer a group derived of RIT friends, but a sustainable and growing city wide community, with influence reaching through universities, high schools, and now several businesses. I am eager to see where this next and upcoming year will take Zac and I, and also Rochester as a whole.

Charles Moreland